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George Henry Alsop
Appearance George was first seen wearing a churchman's collar and an old-fashioned frock coat, once fine but now threadbare. History He was, the Vicar of Saint Edmund-Standing-in-the-Moor, in North Allerton, just north of Leeds. With his wife, Rosemary, now departed, they had but one child, a daughter, Nancy. When Nancy grew up, beautiful and wild, she married one Jack Faber, a poet, scholar, and a bit of a rascal. They were well matched, for Nancy, always a cheerful child, had grown into a young woman of independent mind and adventurous spirit. At any rate, they had a child, Mary, and then later another, Penelope, and after that they decided to decamp for London, for there was certainly nothing in St. Edmunds for a penniless scholar like Jack Faber, and nothing to contain the spirit of Nancy. Jack believed himself in possession of a teaching post in London and so they all set out. Jack, Nancy, Penny, and Mary. He never saw any of them again. A number of years later, he was teaching Sunday School one day and found that two boys, two very naughty boys, were giggling over an assignment, one of the book of Job, which he never found particularly funny, and upon peering at their book from behind them, he found something quite different therein. What they had was a copy of a penny-dreadful book called Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary Jacky' Faber, Ship's Boy. He would have immediately thrown the thing away and given the boys a swift smack for their inattention to their lessons, but the 'Mary Faber' caught his eye. He wandered off and read the first page and it was like the very heavens opening up. What was described there was nothing less than a description of the end of his own dear family, the thing most precious to hm in the world. But through the misery of reading of my own lovely daughter's lifeless body being dumped in a cart, he saw that glimmer of hope—the hope that one of him had survived. It became an obsession with him—it was all he could think of—could the child in that book be his own daughter's daughter? When he heard from a traveling tinker that the girl who was the her in that book was known to make port in Harwich, well, he had to know, and so he packed up what little he had—and it was not much, even his books belonged to the vicarage—handed over his post to a young Reverend Stewart, who always wanted it so much anyway, and he put his foot on the road and went there. He walked there on foot, shank's mare, mostly, but sometimes a kindly farmer would give him a lift on his hay wagon. And once he rode for ten full miles on the back of a plow horse next to a cheerful plowboy riding the other member of the team. As soon as the letters from Jack and Nancy stopped, he went to London. He feared the worst—and the worst is what he found. He learned that they had died and had been buried in a common grave and no word on his granddaughters. He later found reading Jacky’s book that, they were not buried in a common grave, and were stripped and thrown into a lime pit at the edge of town, and as for Penny, she was sold to the anatomists to be cut up and put in jars.